Total War: ATTILA – Non-Standard Mechanics Guide

There are a few non-standard mechanics in the game that it is good to be aware of.

Guide to Non-Standard Mechanics

1. Hun stacks will respawn if destroyed unless Attila has been killed. Attila doesn’t spawn until turn 100 (AD 420). And you need to “kill” Attila three times before he stays dead. The Huns (and White Huns) almost always raze settlements they take, so they are bad news.
2. Fertility drops over the game, until almost all regions except the Med basin are infertile. This means agriculture should be gradually switched from wheat (which needs ferility) to cows (which are less dependent on fertile soil). Also fishing ports, food markets and some tradable food resources can help.
3. Each province needs to be self-sufficient in food or suffer a 25% income penalty, and a -20 or so hit to public order. Basically, no economic investment is likely to have a bigger rate of return than achieving food self-sufficiency. Exempting a province from tax avoids the public order penalty (but comes with a 100% income penalty instead of a 25% one!). Global food security is less of a binding issue, typically, but leads to faction wide army attrition if not met.
4. Public order is more of a constraint than in most TW games – it jumps around a lot (e.g. something like a one off -20 penalty for a settlement being occupied plus a -15 penalty for unrest that diminishes by one each turn). Public order ratchets down over time, like soil fertility, and also indirectly falls due to immigration, which tends to rise over time. Playing as Romans, I find public order my #1 concern: basically – aside from one military recruitment province – all my WRE building budget goes on public order buildings and the food/sanitation to feed them.

Player opinion is often very critical of the above mechanics, but I think they do a pretty decent job of simulating the period and sustaining the challenge.

On factions, be aware that they are very diverse and non-standard. There are two big, exposed empires – the ERE and WRE; one big, rising empire – the Sassanids. There are quite a lot of horde factions. And there are two tiny one settlement factions, the Saxons and the Franks. The DLCs add more variety – typically more one settlement factions.